As an aid to passing along our local magic history to future members, Ring 56 "The Mystic I.K.I." has been writing quick blogs called the "Did you know...?" series. Thought we would post them here too as some of you might like the idea. So, without further ado, here is the first one as an example:

Episode #1: The Walter Blaney Ladder Levitation



Did you know... that the Walter Blaney Ladder Levitation, arguably one of the greatest illusions ever conceived, had its lay audience media debut in Evansville due to a Ring 56 member?

Walter spent over a decade designing his ladder levitation. When it was ready, he decided to perform it publicly for the first time at the 1965 IBM convention in Des Moines Iowa. It was a smash sensation! Walter was then booked to present it at the Abbotts Magic Get Together in Colon Michigan a month later. This would give Walter some 'safe' experience with it before he started presenting it to large lay audiences.

Ring 56 member David Hoy (aka Dr. Faust) was a friend of Walter Blaney. David invited him to come to Evansville, Indiana prior to the Get Together for some R&R time. But how would Walter practice? No problem, David arranged for a teenage girl in the neighborhood to assist as the "floatee".

But David wasn't just a fantastic magician and mentalist in his own right, he was a radio personality in Evansville. And he had a flair for publicity and a passion for pranks. So, he executed on both fronts.

First, he invited his media buddies to come and meet Walter at a pool party where he performed the ladder levitation in just his swim trunks & boots! This made all the local media including page 1 of the Evansville paper.





Second, he did a prank interview with Walter Blaney on the radio. Walter thought he was live on-the-air. But in fact, it was just being recorded as a joke. During the interview, David asked Walter some...how should we put it... risque questions!

A video of the levitation at the pool and the subject matter of that prank interview can be found in the Walter Blaney Documentary posted here: https://youtu.be/jLllrnJmT40 It is well worth the watch.

So there you have it, IBM Ring 56's connection to one of the greatest illusions of all time!

Episode #2: The Founding of IBM Ring 56, The Mystic I.K.I. [Editor note: this was first posted on September 6, 2022]

Did you know... that the Mystic IKI was founded in late September 1947? This means that our next meeting will mark our Ring's 75th anniversary!

Before the forming of the Evansville-centered Mystic IKI, "Ring 56" was the designation for the South Bend, Indiana "Mystic Ring". That Ring had gone into hibernation in April 1939 along with many others during the Great Depression and World War II time span. This allowed other IBM members to start another ring under that designation. The new "Ring 56, The Mystic IKI" was thus formed in September 1947 operating under a temporary charter until April 1948 when it gained full status.

Below is our first Ring report from the October 1947 Linking Ring magazine (Vol 27 Issue 8 Page 116). The founding members kicked things off with a dinner and a full hour show. In the report they prognosticated "We feel this new Ring is going to be a strong link in the tri-state area." Now that was a good prediction!



Happy Anniversary IBM Ring 56, The Mystic IKI!

Episode #3: Magic and The Kennedy Assassination Investigation

Did you know... that a member of Ring 56 was a primary witness in the Warren Commission Investigation into the JFK assassination because of a magic trick he performed?

There are few days in American history that people are so shocked by an event that they vividly remember exactly what they were doing when they heard the news. Among these is November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was killed. Law enforcement quickly apprehended and charged Lee Harvey Oswald for the crime. But before he could be fully interrogated, he was killed by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963. This launched one of the most intensive investigations in U.S. history. All of Oswald’s and Ruby’s movements in the weeks before came under intense scrutiny as police, the media, and congress all tried to understand if this was the action of a lone gunman or if there was a larger conspiracy underlying it.

What does this have to do with Ring 56? One of our most illustrious members, Bill DeMar, was a primary witness in this investigation because of a magic trick he had performed about a week before!

Bill (broken wand 2015) is recognized as one of the greatest entertainers of his generation. He is most known for his contributions to ventriloquism like the tape-over-the-mouth technique. Indeed, his course on learning ventriloquism is often referred to as the "Tarbell course for vents"!



But in addition to vent work, he was also a master fire eater, master standup comic, and master magician! This made him an ideal emcee for variety shows as he could quickly change his act to not clash with other performers. This skill brought him to the attention of Jack Ruby who owned two night clubs in Dallas Texas. Jack hired Bill as the headliner for his Carousel Club (see newspaper ad).



Bill performed a show each night and also acted as the emcee. He would rotate with another performer every couple of weeks. Jack gave Bill a lot of feedback on the type of entertainment he wanted to see. Among this was mentalism, a type of magic Bill knew well because of his Evansville Central school classmate and fellow Ring 56 member, David Hoy (aka Dr. Faust; broken wand 1981). He was on his fourth rotation headlining at the Carousel Club when the assassination took place.

Upon watching the coverage of the assassination and seeing images of Oswald, Bill immediately recognized him as being a volunteer in his "photographic memory" act about a week before! Bill would have twenty customers call out various objects in rapid order. He would instantly memorize these and be able to play them back in any order desired by the audience. Bill remembered Oswald being one of the customers that had provided an item for that act.

He was determined to speak with Ruby about this so went in early to work that afternoon but found the club locked. Ruby had closed the club for three days and his assistant was supposed to notify Bill but he never received that message. So, Bill never got to talk to Ruby that day or the next. If he had, he may have been able to dissuade him from killing Oswald!

After Ruby killed Oswald, the media and police investigators were trying to establish the prior connection between them, if any. Word got around that Bill had seen Oswald at the club. He wasn't the only worker at the club who had reported seeing Oswald there, several others had independently come forward. But because of his reputation of having a photographic memory, the media outlets singled him out as a perfect witness. Bill tried to dissuade them from that angle, explaining it is just part of his act, but they ran with it anyway. Bill was soon invited on national television with Dan Rather to talk about Ruby and seeing Oswald at the club (see video of that interview).



Unfortunately, things quickly took a dark turn. The FBI investigation uncovered that Bill DeMar had performed at a high-profile inauguration party for JFK along with David Hoy. The improbability of Bill being both at the inauguration and death scene seemingly raised the FBI's suspicion that Bill wasn't just a witness, but a suspect in a conspiracy! In fact, the FBI apparently tapped, taped, and transcribed a phone conversation between Bill and David, who happened to be a member of the Evansville news media. In the call David suggested that Bill may want to consider going into hiding for a while, a not so unreasonable thought given that rumors of Ruby being connected to organized crime had started circulating. But the FBI may have looked at this suggestion differently.

In an interview with the Evansville Courier newspaper the day after Ruby shot Oswald, he explained away the conspiracy notion: "It's all a strange coincidence. I entertained at a party at Kennedy's inauguration, I had contact with the man accused of killing him, and I worked for the man accused of killing the killer."

Despite explaining the coincidence, Bill was put under a lot of stress during his subsequent shows, oftentimes with a substantial portion of the audience being Federal agents, media, and other interested parties. Bill described the challenge of this in an interview many years later: "When you're standing on stage and the only audience is FBI or Secret Agents and there's no response and you're doing jokes to pitch black,,,yeah just [a spotlight] on me…I can’t time anything because there's no response. And I see like a match going back and forth in the dark…I didn’t know what that was…It turned out to be some guy that wanted to make contact with me or something. He wasn't a government agent of any kind, just some guy. And that was unnerving.”



Bill's experience was perceived as so drastic that it reportedly deterred other witnesses from coming forward until much later in the investigation, sometimes years. An example was Dallas cab driver Raymond Cummings who reported taking Oswald to The Carousel Club. He didn’t initially come forward because, according to his lawyer, he knew "about the entertainer at The Carousel…who claimed he saw someone in the place and what happened to him afterward. He had a lot of harassment and I think he wound up in Illinois somewhere."



On June 2, 1964, Bill dutifully testified in Washington D.C. for the Warren Commission. During that testimony, the interviewer was somewhat hostile, and asked Bill to disclose how the memory act was done. He deftly redirected this, upholding the magician's oath. But he did explain that he used Thornton's system which relied on memory gimmicks (see ad).



In later years, conspiracy theories continued to flourish, and Bill began to refuse to talk about this experience except with close friends. In 2013, he declined a request for an interview by the Evansville Courier & Press for a 50th anniversary retrospective. But Ring 56 member and former State Senator, Phil Hoy, a friend of Bill and brother to David Hoy, did respond. Talking about the FBI contact with David he stated: "They wanted to know if David believed DeMar's account of seeing Oswald in Ruby's club. He said he believed every word. We are not, as a family, very strong on conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death. On the other hand, we have wondered if there are things that we haven't been told. There's a lot of intrigue surrounding the relationship between Ruby and Oswald, if they had one." (see: https://www.courierpress.com/story/news/......0729001/)

While the Warren Report suggested that there likely was not a prior connection between Ruby and Oswald, a later congressional investigation has suggested otherwise. Many of the documents regarding possible connections remain classified and unreleased. So, as of now, we still don't know. But one lesson we can take away from Bill's experience is that when we perform magic, we meet many interesting people. And some of these may be notorious, in both connotations of that word!